For the latest data visit brickarchitect.com/lugbulk/.

2021 LUGBULK Parts Analysis (Data from January 2021)

This page preserves the data and analysis which was included with the first version of my How LUGBULK Works article from January 2021. (Use the link above to access the latest data!)

Part Cost

The most obvious way to make the most out of LUGBULK is to focus on parts with the greatest discount compared to sites like BrickLink. As mentioned earlier, LUGBULK prices are confidential, so I can not highlight those parts which offer the greatest discount in this article. (That’s an excercise you are welcome to do with the other members of your LUG.)

What I can do is simply highlight those parts, colors, and specific elements which tend to be the most expensive on BrickLink. If they happen to be available through LUGBULK, they are good candidates for saving money.

Chart indicating the price of each common part in each color (that it is available in).

BrickLink cost of common LEGO Parts. (Click for high-resolution PDF.)

I know that the chart is very large and hard to read. I recommend reading it on the largest monitor you have, and clicking the photo to load a larger high-resolution PDF version of the chart.

Decoding the chart

  • Each Column represents one of the 41 solid colors in the current LEGO Color Palette.
    The colors are sorted by how common they are using a weighted scoring system explained on another chart near the end of this article.
  • Each Row represents a single part / mould.
    I selected these 66 parts based on a mix of my intuition about the LEGO System of parts, and my ongoing analysis of the Most Commmon LEGO Parts.
  • Each Cell represents a single element (unique part + color).
    The cells are color-coded indicating whether that color of each part is cheaper than (green) or more expensive than (red) when compared to the median cost of that part across all colors.

Expensive Elements

Using the chart provided above, we can look for bright red cells, indicating that a given color is more expensive than average for that part.

There are some extreme examples such as a 2×4 Brick (part 3001) in 18NougatFlesh which costs $62.32 per part. Really extreme prices like this are usually caused by a small number of non-production parts escaping the factory and ending up on BrickLink. These won’t be relevant for LUGBULK since non-production parts are not available for us to buy, either.

Expensive Colors

The color-coding also makes it easy to identify colors which are more expensive than average. Just look for a column that includes a lot of Red and Orange cells.

38Dark Orange and 151Sand Green are good examples of this… While some elements in these colors are not terribly expensive, there are a lot of elements which are quite costly.

For example, the classic 1×1 Brick (part 3005) in 38Dark Orange costs $0.14 per part, whereas the same part in 106Bright OrangeOrange is just $0.03. (106Bright OrangeOrange and 119Bright Yellowish GreenLime are consistently some of the least expensive colors.)

Because BrickLink is a real economic market, the standard forces of supply and demand are at play here. I suspect that 106Bright OrangeOrange and 119Bright Yellowish GreenLime are some of the cheapest colors because they are common colors so the supply is high. By contrast, they do not seem to be the most popular colors with AFOL’s, resulting in a lower demand.

Likewise, even though 194Medium Stone GreyLight Bluish Gray and 199Dark Stone GreyDark Bluish Gray are some of the most common colors, they aren’t the cheapest colors. While I can’t know for sure, my best guess is that they are a bit more expensive because they are extremely popular with Castle and Star Wars fans, driving up the costs a bit.

Expensive Parts

While this chart isn’t optimized for comparing the prices across many different parts, there is an easy way to do an apples-to-apples comparison across basic bricks and plates: the per-stud cost (based on the median price for each part).

Per-stud-cost of 1x Plates:

  • 1×1 Plate – $0.055 per part / 1 stud = $0.06 per stud.
  • 1×2 Plate – $0.057 per part / 2 stud = $0.03 per stud.
  • 1×3 Plate – $0.107 per part / 3 stud = $0.04 per stud.
  • 1×4 Plate – $0.068 per part / 4 stud = $0.02 per stud.
  • 1×6 Plate – $0.076 per part / 6 stud = $0.01 per stud.
  • 1×8 Plate – $0.159 per part / 8 stud = $0.02 per stud.

Per-stud-cost of 1x Bricks:

  • 1×1 Brick – $0.063 per part / 1 stud = $0.06 per stud.
  • 1×2 Brick – $0.052 per part / 2 stud = $0.03 per stud.
  • 1×3 Brick – $0.104 per part / 3 stud = $0.03 per stud.
  • 1×4 Brick – $0.091 per part / 4 stud = $0.02 per stud.
  • 1×6 Brick – $0.168 per part / 6 stud = $0.03 per stud.
  • 1×8 Brick – $0.279 per part / 8 stud = $0.03 per stud.

The surprising discovery after doing the math is that 1×1 parts carry a significant premium on BrickLink, but there isn’t a huge price-per-stud difference across the rest of the range of 1×2 to 1×8 parts.

It was also interesting to see that the same size brick and plate cost about the same on BrickLink, even though you need three times as many plates to make a similarly sized wall!

Part Availability

While saving money is one of the primary motivations in participating in LUGBULK, it may make sense to include a relatively inexpensive part on your order if you need a very large quantity of that part to build a MOC. For example, there might not be a single BrickLink seller who has the part in the quantities you need. (It doesn’t really matter if the savings via LUGBULK is modest compared to the average BrickLink price if LUGBULK is the only practical way to get it in large quantities!)

Another reason to include less expensive but useful parts in your order is to help meet the minimum purchase requirements. If your LUG is pretty small, you might not be able to hit the minimum purchase requirements if all 85 of the parts the group selects are specialty parts and nobody needs them in large quantities.

While I haven’t done the analysis to highlight elements which are hard to find in large quantities, it is easy enough to find an element that you want on BrickLink, then use the “Minimum Qty” filter to see where you can buy it in large quantities. You may decide to buy from a few sellers to get enough of the same part (or save money)—just don’t forget to consider shipping costs!

Chart showing most common parts and colors between 2016-2020

Common LEGO Part availability in recent sets. (Click for high-resolution PDF.)

Decoding the chart

  • Each Column represents one of the 41 solid colors in the current LEGO Color Palette.
    Colors are sorted by how common they are using a weighted scoring system (which you will see along the bottom of the PDF version of this chart).
  • Each Row represents a single part / mould.
    I selected these 66 parts based on a mix of my intuition about the LEGO System of parts, and my ongoing analysis of the Most Commmon LEGO Parts.
  • Each Cell represents a single element (unique part + color). The value in each cell iindicates how many of that element you would have if you bought one of every set released from 2016-2020 and sorted by element.
    The cells are color-coded indicating whether that color of each part is more common (green) or less common (red) when compared to the median quantity of that part across all colors.

Rare colors of common parts

While the cost analysis in the previous chart is more useful for deciding which parts to order from LUGBULK, this chart is useful for understanding which colors are fundamentally more or less common within real LEGO Sets.

This slice of the data does highlight a few interesting observations:

  • 138Sand YellowDark Tan is actually quite common, even though some really common parts like 1×3 Brick and 2×2 Round Plate aren’t yet available in that color.
  • While 141Earth GreenDark Green is available in a limited selection of parts, it is pretty common in 1×1 through 1×6 plates.
  • 151Sand Green stands out because it is pretty common in many basic parts, despite high prices on secondary market (as seen in the previous chart).